On Friday, I was so pleased to be able to return to one of my favorite days of the year, High-Interest Day at Brookfield Elementary School. This is a day where I have been able to bring the concepts of physics to k-5 graders. You may be asking yourself, "Elementary students doing physics?" YES! Not just experimenting, but understanding the concepts behind the physics of electricity and sound. This is a very special day I have had the opportunity to be involved in since 2017. So, how are we able to bring the concepts of electricity and sound traditionally taught to high school 11th and 12th graders to the elementary level? There are a few keys 1) make it a hands-on experience 2) remove the mathematical calculations and make it practical. In the past, I had the luck of bringing a handful of my physics students with me to guide the elementary students through the concepts that they had learned over the course of the year. But in my new role as a Teaching and Learning Speciali
We help out 7th Passion Project Expo this week. We had a lot of interesting projects but there was a first that I thought was pretty cool. For the past 3 years, I have had a few students build VR spaces to present their projects using CoSpaces. This year though, I had a student decide to use Google’s brand new Tour Creator to create VR experience . Now, Tour Creator may have been created initially with the idea of using landscape images to create a “tour”, but Emily Taylor did something a bit different. She used images and text to create an informative experience exploring theories around interdimensional beings. Her experience is embedded below, but what’s even cooler is if you go to the link: https://poly.google.com/view/a3LxyoasCTj You can export it to the Expeditions App and view it in VR on your own or guide a tour. In this tour, the hotspots are not specifically tied to their location on the background. But I could image this being done with great effect on something like an